My Summer With George by Marilyn French
“After a few years, I guess we had to get a little distance from each other, and we began to move a bit apart, but everything we did was done with one eye out for how the other would respond to it, what the other would think…
“And the years went by, and we got older. Our bodies got older: I got thinner, he got heavier, he lost his hair. Then it became terribly important to him that it be known that he was still…potent. Or attractive. Or sexy. Something. You remember how he was, how he fooled around—everyone knew. All those young women, one younger than the next. It was utterly humiliating to me. But I had to keep my affairs secret, because it wouldn’t do to damage his manly ego. And then he got so conservative in his old age! It was really hard to talk to him then.”
I gazed at her in shock.
She stared at me with hostility. I thought that for a moment she was seeing Garson, not me. At least, I hoped so. “You look incredulous.”
“I didn’t understand…,” I faltered.
She wiped her hand across her face. “No, I suppose not. I don’t understand, myself.” Her voice thickened, her eyes filled. “It’s just that since he died, all these memories come clamoring back: so many wonderful times we had, such great talk, such magnificent sex…He was the love of my life. Even the anger, even the arguments—they were part of it, part of the passion. When he was dying, we were having a fight, one of our many. An old girlfriend of his wanted to visit, and I didn’t want her to see him in that condition. He wanted her to come, wanted to make her feel sorry for him, wanted to see her cry: I knew him…and I just blasted him. He was such a selfish bastard! I told him he didn’t want to see her to see her, because he cared about her—because he didn’t! All he wanted was to milk her of emotion, the way he always did with women, those young ones especially. To squeeze love and adoration out of them, have them pour it over his head, anoint him with it. And I said he was so self-involved, he never really knew what those young girls were feeling or thinking, but a couple of them had come to me—would you believe it? They had. Weeping about him, his selfishness, his denseness. I wasn’t the most sympathetic ear…
“So then I told him. I told him I’d had as many affairs as he, with young men, older men, all kinds. Of course, I didn’t know how many affairs he’d had; I just exaggerated my own. But I recited a whole list—some of his closest friends. Including a priest and a rabbi. That really got him! He was lying there in his hospital bed, he was in a fury, he rose up from the bed, he wanted to kill me, he stretched out his hands to strangle me, but he was too weak to do anything. I laughed. Then he laughed too. Then we both began to cry. We clutched each other’s hands. What a pair!”
Nina began to sob.
People at nearby tables glanced toward us uneasily.
“Too bad you didn’t have children,” I mumbled stupidly. “You might be less depressed.”
“There was no room for children!” she shrieked. “There was only us. Us, us, us! Don’t you understand? Everything we did was directed at the other. The affairs, his and mine! His growing conservatism! Conservatism, hell; he became a reactionary! It was a blow at me. A hostile act. Because my work was starting to get known—I had won a couple of prizes, I was being asked to read here and there—and he had become a little…out of date, a little passé. It was after I won the National Book Award that he wrote that really disgusting book about Jews and blacks.”
I laughed.
“It’s funny?” She dropped her anger out of curiosity.
“Well…it was an ironic laugh,” I apologized, although I did in fact find it funny. “Here you two really lived out the great love affair. And it was so…”
“Ugly,” she muttered. “Yes. But it was magnificent too, you know. We were everything to each other. We ranged the entire gamut of emotion—we had the most intense passion for each other and the most bitter hatred, the uttermost craving need and the uttermost flaming resentment.”
I gazed at her with a little animosity and considerable respect. “You have really probed this relationship, plumbed it…Are you going to write a poetry sequence about it? You should.”
“Umm,” she pondered. “Yes. I should. I suppose I have, really. If I just gathered together fifty or so unpublished poems, it might be already written…That’s a good idea, Hermione,” she said, in a cool professional voice from which all passion had suddenly vanished. “You know, come to think of it, it’s our generation. Yours, mine, his—well, he was a generation older. He had it even more.”
“Had what?”
“The myth. The dream. Prince and Princess, True Love, Love Forever, Happily Ever After. And the truth is, we had it. We had it for real. With all the ambivalence, the rage, the betrayals…I’m often surprised we didn’t end up killing each other.”
“I don’t think that’s what most people mean when they talk about True Love and Love Forever.”
“No. But they’re stupid—because that’s what true love, love forever, is. It’s not some sweet nice pretty hand-holding valentine. It’s plowing your whole emotional self—which is far from pretty—with one other person. For a lifetime. It’s a bubbling stew, a violent concoction, it’s living inside a pressure cooker. One that explodes regularly, spattering the walls and ceiling with blood.
“Love. Hah! We all want true love, love forever. We’re raised to want it, educated to want it, brainwashed into wanting it. Only most people are too cowardly to accept it…like you.”
Moi!
“Oh, don’t blink your eyes at me, Hermione. How many times have you been married? At the least sign of passion rooting itself in you, you run.”
I wanted to defend myself, to remind her that two of my husbands had died, one had left me, and the first—well, he was utterly impossible. But instead I attacked. “Well, truthfully, Nina, if what you describe is true passion and love forever after, I’ll do without it. It sounds sick to me.”
“Oh, it is, no question,” she said easily. “It’s a neurotic myth. We’d be much better off without it. But we’ve got it, so we either have to live it out or fail to live it out.” She stood up. “I have to go to the loo.”
I paid the bill. I wondered if we’d ever be able to be friends again. I couldn’t figure out what I’d said or done to arouse Nina’s antagonism. I may have been dense, but I’d tried to be amiable. She was a difficult woman to please. I decided to conclude that she was crazy. It was the easiest solution.
Nina reappeared and picked up her cape. “Ready?” She seemed simply to assume that I’d paid the check. Of course, romance novelists earn much more than poets. It was only fair. Or maybe poets don’t think about money at all but take it for granted that they will be kept fed and clothed.
“Right,” I said, rising. We walked out of the restaurant into midday heat and headed for the parking lot. It was far too hot for heavy clothes, but Nina kept her cape wrapped around her. When we reached my car, I stopped and called out, “Well, goodbye, Nina.” She had kept walking, but turned when I called. She walked back to me. Dropping her cape, she grabbed me and hugged me.
“Thanks,” she murmured in my ear. “Thanks so much.” She pushed me away from her, holding me by both arms. “You are a wonder. There’s no one else I could have had this conversation with. No one else would have understood. They would have been shocked, horrified. That I should reveal this stuff about the great Garson Brumbach! But you just accepted it. You saw! Immediately, without argument! I feel so much better! It was a great lunch, Hermione. I’ll never forget it. Or you for asking me. And you gave me a wonderful idea for a book. I’d dedicate it to you if I didn’t have to dedicate it to Garson.” She kissed my cheek. She dropped her arms, picked up her cape, threw it around her, and walked swiftly to her car. I stood, baffled and battered, watching her cape ripple in the little breeze she made by walking. She did not look back.
I meandered, driving home, gazing at the beauty around me, remembering my first apartment in New York, a seedy place with peeling paint on the walls, the tub in the kit
Jerry had driven us down. He rented a van so he could transport all Lettice’s equipment—crib and high chair and diapers and clothes and toys—as well as some things from the apartment. I didn’t take much—my books, some dishes and pots, linens—just enough to get me started in my new home. I had quite a time packing them up without Bert’s noticing, and that he did not testifies more to his disinterest than to my cleverness. Susan and Merry had found me a fourth-floor walk-up in the East Seventies. It had two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, and was only forty dollars a month.
I left Bert a note, propped up against a tuna casserole. I wrote that if he wanted to see Lettice, he could call Jerry and I’d set up a visit. I wished him a happier future. He did call Jerry that night, yelling about the fact that I’d deceived him, “put one over” on him. He didn’t seem disturbed by the fact that I’d left him, and he never asked to see Lettice. In fact, he didn’t call again for two years, when he told Jerry he wanted a divorce because he wanted to remarry. I was happy about that—it annulled any residual guilt I felt toward him. I fervently hoped his second marriage was more satisfying than his first. I never saw him again. My summer with Bert had lasted rather longer than I would have wished. I wonder what would have happened if my summer with George had endured into the fall.
After all my daydreams of living in New York, I was frightened and lonely the first year I was there. My sisters saved me: on weekends, we tried to give one day over entirely to pleasure. We sought out every free event in town—and there were lots: walking tours, concerts, readings, even theater. When nothing else appealed, we went to Central Park, which was always a circus on Sundays.
Merry’s boyfriend—a graduate student she’d met in the park—made blind dates for me; we’d go together, as a double date. The boys he chose were college boys around my age; they were Jewish, and like him, went to NYU. Most of them had grown up poor, like me. They had strong New York accents, and they dressed horribly. I thought their backgrounds would enable me to empathize with them in a way I couldn’t with the tea dance boys. But they were amazingly like the boys from Harvard, Yale, and Brown: they, too, acted as if their experience was something they owned, the purpose of which was to provide a weapon against others. Unlike the boys I’d met at Holyoke, their experience was not of skiing or sailing or riding or voyages to Europe on ocean liners; what they had was knowledge, which they held up for your inspection, so far above your head, you couldn’t reach up and touch it. You were supposed to just admire it.
They knew about music and books and politics; a couple even knew about art. They dropped names that left me speechless: Mahler, Hindemith, Newman, Morris Louis, Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Malraux, and other names so foreign to me then I can’t remember them now. Of the writers they mentioned, the only one I’d read was Faulkner. They were given to pronouncements like “No serious music has been written since Brahms!” or “African art? You call that art? Art didn’t begin until Giotto!” or “Western art has been one long deviation from the true path of art, which in no other culture has taken the form of realism.” They said such things in tones so supercilious, with facial expressions so haughty, that not only contradiction but even discussion was impossible. I shriveled, feeling stupid and uncultivated, listening in intimidated silence. These boys didn’t mind my silence; they seemed to like it—and me. Most of them asked to see me again. And again. But I minded. I minded feeling stupid and ignorant and inexperienced about things that mattered to me; I minded feeling unknowledgeable.
So while I tended not to go out with any one of them more than a few times, these boys inspired me to form educational projects on my own. I took night courses in art and music history. In the afternoons, after a morning of writing, I went to museums. I pushed Lettice through so many, I was sure she would grow up to be an artist. I had to wait until she was a bit older to take her to concerts, but we listened religiously to the classical music on WNYC and WQXR. I took courses in French, German, and Italian; I read Proust, Goethe, and Dante; I read philosophy and history. I wanted to prove to myself that the Millington High School teachers had been right about me. And the first year I was really ahead, I wrote them a thank-you note and enclosed a thousand-dollar check for them to use as they chose. I told them I hoped they would spend it on the library, or another student, like me but less foolish. They wrote back—the ones who were still there; they were really happy for my success and didn’t say a single derogatory word about my writing romances.
I pulled into my driveway, smiling about those early years in New York. Although I was often wretched with fear; worried about money and whether the latest book I was working on would be acceptable, would earn anything beyond its advance—and how I would feed Lettice if it didn’t—and sad with loneliness, my memories of my first years in New York are dominated by great excitement and pleasure. It was a time of vivid life and emotion, of tremendous learning and deep feeling. It was the beginning of a new life I was creating for myself. I was building it on the ruins of my youth, on top of the ruins of the beliefs and practices that most people held when I was in my twenties. Few people still believe in them. Even Delia is no longer so mean and narrow: she’s had to accept one son divorcing, another leaving the church…
I decided that it was in those past events that the notion of Prince Charming was rooted. I’d probably never get rid of it; it was the last vestige of my reptile brain.
My sisters managed to create their own lives too, although it took them a long time. A few years after I moved to New York, Susan and Eldon moved to Long Island, to one of those flat barren towns with identical small flat gray houses and ugly names like Levittown, Hicksville, Amityville. Susan had a couple of adorable kids, a girl and a boy, and devoted herself to them entirely when they were little. But once they were grown, she opened her own advertising agency out on Long Island. She said no one knows more about a business than a good secretary, and that she’d known more about her agency’s workings than any of the guys she’d worked for, even the president. She must have been right, because her own agency was very successful.
When she founded it, she wanted two words to name her agency—one that conjured an image of an honest, moral, healthy America and one suggesting enormous wealth and prestige. After much discussion—and giggling among Susan and Eldon, Merry and me—she chose Kellogg, after the cereals, and Astor, after the millionaire immortalized in the Waldorf-Astoria. To hear the bank manager roll the name Astor Kellogg around in his mouth as if it were something grand and important was pure delight, especially since at first the company consisted of two desks and a set of telephones in a front room! Eventually, Susan moved into commercial offices in Manhasset, and when Eldon lost his job (“inevitable in the advertising business,” Susan said), he became her art director. They not only lived happily ever after but are still doing so, with five grandchildren, a plump financial portfolio, and a retirement home in Maine.
Tina, too, had success. For her first few years in Hollywood, she worked as an extra. But someone gave her a part with two lines, and soon afterward, she got a bit part in a film with George Raft. That got her noticed, and she became quite well known; she was featured in eight or ten films under the name Tina Twining. Unfortunately, her popularity didn’t last. But she foresaw that, she said in her letters. She knew that actresses become obsolete at thirty-five, and she made sure that before she lost her looks, she married a rich insurance executive. She wanted to be absolutely certain, she wrote, that she would never never never have to work in a bakery again. She doesn’t write often, and we rarely see her. It’s as if she feels not part of our family, as if we excluded her. Mayb
Merry got married too—well, of course, everyone got married in those days—but her marriage didn’t work out too well. Her husband turned out to be a secret gambler, and she was never sure how much money they had or whether their monthly mortgage check would bounce. So she finally left him and raised her two girls alone on a secretary’s pay. They lived in some hardship, but Susan, Jerry, and I all helped her. I often think that was our mother’s training, the way we always pulled together as a family—except Tina, come to think of it. Merry’s girls are grown, and she’s retired now, quite content, I think. She lives with a woman, a retired schoolteacher. I suspect they’re lovers, although she doesn’t let on. So it took her until she was fifty to make the life she wanted, but she did it. And she still reads romances! She’s my best critic.
Only Jerry, of all of us, didn’t take command of his life. He had too much of Mother’s self-sacrificing tendency, I guess. He tried to be good for Delia, good in Delia’s way. It worked for her, but not for him. They had three boys. Delia stayed young-looking and healthy, guiding her sons toward religion: one of them became a priest, for a few years, anyway. (It nearly killed Delia when he went over the fence, as they say.) But Jerry turned slowly gray over the years, gray and old, and two years ago, he died of angina—just like Mother. I’ll never stop missing him.
Over the years, I became successful too. Eda Doyle retired in 1961 and went to live in the south of France. I heard she died sometime in the seventies. Swan Books is long extinct too; Heartbreak House publishes me now. I get a great deal of money for my novels these days, and Molly sells them in England and in other European countries. At least twenty of them have been sold to the movies; eight have made it through production. Of course, by then they were unrecognizable. I don’t take that seriously; I don’t take what I do very seriously, either. But it has provided me with a wonderful life. I raised Lettice and my other three children, all on my writing.